ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak Video Card

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The ASUS EAH5870/2DIS/1GD5 graphics card is equipped with Voltage Tweak technology, as part of the SmartDoctor application and that is what makes this card stand out from the crowd. Without the SmartDoctor application it would be like any other ATI Radeon HD 5870 on the market today, but that is luckily not the case. The ASUS EAH5870 gives consumers the ability to adjust the GPU voltages and to overclock beyond what you can do using just the ATI OverDrive utility. Factor in that you also get a product key for Colin McRae: DiRT 2 and you have a really good value on your hands.

The performance of the ASUS EAH5870 graphics card was identical to a reference ATI Radeon HD 5870, but that is okay as the Radeon HD 5870 is extremely fast. Not only is the card fast on all of the DirectX 10 games that we tested it on here today, but the ASUS EAH5870 will also fully support DirectX 11. That means you will be able to run new features like HDR Texture Compression, DirectCompute and Tessellation within the new Windows 7 operating system when it comes out later this month. This card has been engineered by AMD from the ground up to take advantage of all the graphical features of Windows 7 so this card is, dare we say, future proof for the time being.

When it comes to overclocking the ASUS EAH5870 was stellar and was the fastest we have gotten any brand’s Radeon HD 5870 card to date. Reaching 1069 MHz on the GPU core with just air cooling was amazing. This is an overclock of nearly 220MHz and that was able to boost our graphics performance by roughly 20% in PC games and in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark Vantage.

Pricing on the ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak video card is $379.99 at Newegg, but it is currently sold out. The Radeon HD 5870 is selling like hot cakes, but now you know that the ASUS version has a little extra something under the hood that makes it a better bargain that some of the other brands on the market that don’t offer voltage adjustments or the PC game Colin McRae: DiRT 2.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS EAH5870 is a great graphics card and the addition of Colin McRae: DiRT 2 and the Voltage Tweak software makes it tough to beat even in a crowded GPU market.